We have an exciting release to announce today. Many of you know the
relationship between your website and Google is a very important one. If
you can make them happy, you will get better rankings, way more traffic
, and subsequently generate more revenue with your business as a
result.

One of Google's core focuses in their ranking algorithm is "user experience", And this derives a great deal out of the speed at which your website functions. Google offers a free platform to that allows you to check whether or not you're pages are optimized for speed based on the criteria they offer.

Conventionally, you have to go off to the Google PageSpeeds Insight page to check the performance of individual pages or posts on your website (or your website homepage).

We've changed that...

First, before I get into the PageSpeed integration, I want to discuss your website speed and the importance of it. This is what the PageSpeed Insights platform is going to be measuring. You have an advantage over competition in any industry by being able to opreate a "faster" site and this is made possible through the SiteSpeed platform here at WA.

SiteSpeed, The Ultimate Website Caching Platform

Back in spring of 2017 we launch the SiteSpeed platform. This was a collection of technological advances that we had done on the server-side of our hosting platform that truly allows your website to operate as efficiently, and as fast as possible. Faster than any other hosting company in the world...that's the goal and from our tests it could very well be reality.

There are caching plug-ins available to Wordpress that are used to speed up websites, but they simply did not do a good enough job as they operated on the "website/plugin level" which is MUCH slower than handling caching on the server (hardware) level.

So our solution...we created the technology to cache all of your content at the server level. You don't need to understand how this works, other than the fact it makes your website load lightening fast for visitors and search engines.

When we see an opportunity to make something better than what is available in the industry, we build it. Out of this, SiteSpeed was born.

If you do not have SiteSpeed already turned on on your website, I recommend you do so and you can do this as a Premium member from within the SiteManager, under the "SitePlus" link.

Then from there, you're simply going to turn on SiteSpeed. It is a simple as that.

I recommend you do this for all of your websites as it will drastically improve load times, efficiency, and will optimize your entire website for Google. This will subsequently it lead to better rankings, more traffic, and more revenue as result.

Keeping Your PageSpeed Insights in "Check"

Google has a "check" that you can perform to see how efficiently your website is serving content to your visitors. This is called PageSpeed Insights and you can now view these Insights directly within your SiteManager here at WA!

To check this out, you can access it through your SiteManager "Details" section for any of your websites that you have hosted here at WA.

Then, once you are in the details page you will scroll down until you see the PageSpeed Insights section (as shown below).

If you are not seeing any data yet, simply click the "Refresh" button for any page that you want to get data on and it will load your PageSpeed Insights directly from Google for those particular pages.

These days, we find that members with SiteSpeed turned on are able to frequently achieve PageSpeed Insights of over 90! Our SiteSpeed platform here at WA creates a level of efficiency unparalleled in the industry. Anything over 80's for a score is very good, but when you get into 90's it is unheard of in the industry.

If you go to any "reputable" hosting company and do a PageSpeed check on sites they have running, you will typically see them in the 40-70 range, rarely in the 90's. This is another added benefit to using the Managed Wordpress hosting platform here at WA, your sites simply run faster and Google will as a result, like them better (and rank you higher).

Sometimes though, your PageSpeed won't be perfect. It doesn't do everything for you, sometimes you will have images or plugins (and ocassionally a theme) that will slow down your website and conflict with with our technology.

Here is an example of the PageSpeed insights for a dieting website that I have.

You can see for the most part this website is in the 90's, which is brilliant! For a few of the "mobile" rankings it is only getting 66/100 though, which is still OK, but can be improved upon.

To "check" these, I click the small "G" icon to the far right which will take me directly to Google so I can inspect and analyze what the exact issue is.

In this case, the issue is not related to images rather the "social plugin" that I am using and the way it loads is inefficient. There are 100's of social button plugins that you can use to allow people to share the content on your website, so in this scenario it might be good to test a few others out to see if they operate more efficiently.

This is how you can take any scores below 70 and work to improve your site so it operates more efficiently in Google and other search engines. This will lead to much higher rankings, happier visitors on your website, and more rankings as a result.

Slow Images Mean a Slow Site

One of the biggest contributing factors to a slow website, is images. Often times people are taking images from online sources and from their own personal camera phone and they are far too large and not optimized for the web, for mobile devices, or for loading speeds.

What you will find often times is that when you look at the actual PageSpeed insights on Google, you will see that your score is a little bit lower than typically it could be because of the image load times.

One thing that you have going for you here at Wealthy Affiliate, is the image compression technology that is run whenever you're using the SiteContent Images platform. Before your content is published your website, we "compress" your images so that the are much smaller in size, without losing visual quality. This leads to faster loading images.

This is just another feature an advantage to using the site content platform and being a Premium member here at Wealthy Affiliate.

If you do notice that your scores are lower than 70/100, it will typically be something related to your images on your site and them being too large, but can also be a plugin causing this like we saw in the earlier example.

PageSpeed at WA, Another Way to Shine Online

The faster your website loads, the better the user experience. The faster your website loads, the better rankings you're going to get. And the faster your website loads, the more money your business is going to generate as a result.

Understanding how speed affects user experience is going to be incredibly important to you and your website moving forward. You can now do this efficiently and in a fully integrated manner with the PageSpeed Insights platform There is now officially available to you within your SiteManager.

I recommend that you go test it out and see how the independent pages/posts on your webiste are fairing. We would love to hear your feedback about this platform, and if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for improvement, of course we are all "ears" :).